Helmuth Buxbaum, a millionaire Ontario nursing home operator convicted in 1986 of the contract killing of his wife, has died. He was 68.

Helmuth Buxbaum, a millionaire Ontario nursing home operator convicted in 1986 of the contract killing of his wife, has died.

Officials at Warkworth Institution, near Peterborough, said in a release today that Buxbaum, 68, died yesterday after being transferred to Kingston Penitentiary Regional hospital.

Cause of death was not given, and an official at the penitentiary refused to provide any further information.

Buxbaum had suffered a stroke in 1982.

Buxbaum was sentenced Feb. 13, 1986, to life imprisonment for the murder of his 48-year-old wife and business partner, Hanna, after a 68-day trial filled with lurid testimony from a rogues gallery of hookers and drug dealers.

Buxbaum, an outwardly respectable churchgoer, was an acknowledged cocaine addict with an appetite for young prostitutes. Testimony indicated he also had a bank account from which $2 million had vanished, and he had recently taken out a $1 million life-insurance policy on his wife.

Hanna Buxbaum was shot by a gunman at the side of a highway in July, 1984. Her husband had pulled over, purportedly to aid two men whose car had apparently broken down.

Testimony at the trial in St. Catharines indicated that the mother of six apparently suspected what was coming, pleading with her husband, “No honey, not this way.”

Buxbaum’s teenage nephew was in the vehicle at the time of the killing.

Buxbaum’s drug supplier, Robert Barrett, testified that Buxbaum paid him $25,000 to arrange the slaying. He was sentenced to 10 years for his part in the conspiracy.

A jury of 10 men and two women deliberated for nearly 12-1/2 hours before returning a guilty verdict.

Buxbaum’s nephew later won a $308,000 judgment against his uncle for trauma suffered in the incident.

The youngest of 10 children of a Baptist minister in wartime Germany, Buxbaum was educated in boarding schools in Austria, then came to Canada as a penniless young adult.

He worked in uranium mines in Elliot Lake before he and his wife began building the chain of nursing homes that would make them millionaires.

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